In an unassuming two-storey former chicken shed in a business park near Cambridge, a four-limbed creature performs an elaborate dance. Versius, the first UK-built surgical robot, is used in the NHS and hospitals around the world, typically to perform abdominal, urological and gynaecological procedures. A surgeon can sit in front of its 3D screen and operate the robot by manipulating two joysticks.
“Cambridge is a good place to do technology,” says Luke Hares, the chief technology officer at CMR Surgical, the company behind Versius. CMR has grown rapidly since its foundation in 2016 and now employs 750 people. As it ramps up exports, with dozens of its $1m-$1.5m (£750,000-£1.1m) robots lined up and awaiting shipment at the firm’s headquarters, it has just announced it will open another factory in nearby Ely to more than triple manufacturing capacity.
This is just the sort of business that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, was referring to in his Conservative party conference speech in Manchester this month, when he said: “We are going to make this country not just a science superpower … we’re going to make the United Kingdom the most exciting place on the planet.”
Hares says he built a wooden single-arm model of Versius in a weekend but it took 18 months to develop a four-arm prototype. Finding financial backers was even trickier. He stresses the “importance of luck in the chain of events”, referring to a chance meeting with CMR’s first backer, the Norwegian investor Per Methi, at a patent lawyer’s office. Methi remains a main shareholder and a board member of the company. “It was either going to be massive or it was going to fail. There’s a level of serendipity that is important,” Hares says.